CA reorganisation puts emphasis on security

Trimming the sails

Computer Associates Tuesday announced a reorganisation of its business to place more emphasis on its core systems management and security operations. CA is dividing itself into business units rather than product-based divisions in a strategy that will see the software giant organised along the same lines as arch-rival IBM.

CA's five new business units - each accountable for its own staffing, strategy and individual profitability - include divisions looking after enterprise systems management, security management, storage management, business service optimization and a CA products group. CA hopes to begin reporting profit and loss figures broken down by business unit starting Q1 2006 (which begins June 2005).

Heading the new enterprise systems management unit will be Alan Nugent, former chief technology officer at Novell, who joins CA on 8 April. Most of the products in CA's Unicenter systems management portfolio will be handled by this division. Toby Weiss will lead the security management business unit, overseeing CA’s eTrust portfolio.

The heads of the five new divisions will report to Russell Artzt, CA's executive vice president for products, who will continue to report to new chief exec John Swainson. CA said the reorganisation will streamline its overall operations and make it more responsive to changing market conditions. It didn't say whether or not the rejig would be accompanied by job cuts.

CA is trying to steady the ship in the aftermath of a long-running accounting scandal that has seen the company's former CEO, Sanjay Kumar, and other former senior executives charged with securities fraud and obstruction of justice. Last September CA agreed to pay $225m to shareholders to compensate for losses resulting from premature booking of $2.2bn in revenue between January 1998 and September 2000. ®